Development Of The Management Module And The Model Transmission Module For The Collaborative Design System

Collaborative Design System (CDS) allows designers from different regions, corporations and departments to design and develop a product at the same time, so that it shortens the development cycle to a great extent. Effective management of the designers involved in the co-design is a basic to achieve efficient co-design. In addition, rapid and accurate transmission of the three-dimensional designed model plays a crucial role in the synchronization of CDS. The following two main tasks have been achieved in this paper based on these above-mentioned reasons and the General Armament Department's 11th Five-Year important pre-project study: "** key technology of distributed collaborative design and manufacture network platform":(1) An Organization Model in the Collaborative Design Workflow Management is established, and the Java Web is designed and developed using Struts framework based on MVC. The function development of Staff Management Sub-Module in the Workflow Management Module is completed, and the management of corporations, departments, staff, projects and roles of the CDS is realized, such as information adding, viewing, updating, deleting operations, as well as staff management for project and roles assign for staff.(2) Secondary development of three-dimensional design software CATIA is implemented and the rapid and accurate transmission of three-dimensional Part model in CDS is realized. In order to realize the rapid and accurate transmission of three-dimensional CATIA Part model, the model transmission method based on the information of festrues is brought forward, and the secondary development of CATIA is implemented using the Component Application Architecture (CAA), which is a powerful tool for products expansion and secondary development of client provided by Dassault Systemes. The functions such as extracting the features' geometric topology information of a three-dimensional Part model, reading and writing the information in the neutral text file as transmission carrier, and rebuilding the three-dimensional Part model according to the features' information are all realized. Finally, integration of the rapid transmission plug-ins with the CDS is developed using ActiveX technology. Transmission test shows that this model transmission module can realize the rapid and accurate transmission of CATIA three-dimensional Part model in CDS, and the equivalent transmission rate is higher when the model file is greater .For example, when the Part model is more than 10MB, the equivalent transmission rate could reach 160KB/s or more.However, the model transmission module can only handle the geometric topology information of CATIA three-dimensional Part model, and many handlings of geometric features (in particular the curved lines and surfaces features) are not satisfied. Handling of these geometric features and those non-geometric featrues of the model (such as tolerances, roughness, materials, etc.) is in urgent need in the future work for further research and development.